Luca Zingaretti

Luca Zingaretti Quick Links

Scripted by Stefano Rulli and Sandro Petraglia, the duo behind 2005's commendable The Best of Youth, Italian director Daniele Luchetti's awkwardly-titled My Brother Is an Only Child starts off in a very odd place before being coaxed back to familiar environs. In telling the story of two brothers on feuding sides of the political spectrum in 1960s Italy, Luchetti begins on the side of pro-Il Duce fascism before getting wrapped up in his own tempered version of post-collegiate radicalism.

Young Accio (Vittorio Emanuele Propizio) yearns for the priesthood, but not as much as his young body yearns for the bodies of Italian movie actresses, whom he discovers through small photos. When he can't get a straight cure from the clerics, Accio goes secular and takes up a kindred cause: fascism. His older brother Manrico (Riccardo Scamarcio) is celebrated by their parents for causing a riot at work under the banner of communism and unionization, but a teenaged Accio, played by the talented Elio Germano, takes chastisement at every turn for his loyalty to the ways of Mussolini.

Truish tale of Artemisia Gentileschi, widely regarded as the first serious woman painter. Fighting discrimination and a dated morality, our heroine struggles to paintwhile society says no. There's also a romance with an older guy which leads to a rather drawn-out inquest, plus a bit of a Sylvia Plath mentality about the whole thing. Ultimately, there's not a terrible lot of insight into Artemisia, but the look into 1600s Italian mores is quite telling.